Construction has officially begun on a $600 million dollar project to rebuild the troubled Pajaro River levee system, nearly 60 years after Congress first identified the need.
“Today is a defining moment in many respects,” said Santa Cruz County 2nd District Supervisor Zach Friend at a Wednesday groundbreaking ceremony in Watsonville. “We’re turning the page from decades of fighting for a project, which will now just be a handful of years of constructing a project, to a new, safe and secure Pajaro Valley.”
Friend also chairs the Pajaro Regional Flood Management Agency, which is spearheading the reconstruction. It includes more than 10 miles of new and refurbished levees designed to provide 100-year flood protection to communities along the Pajaro River watershed including Pajaro and Watsonville. Officials have estimated that the current system provides only 8-year protection.
“It’s long overdue,” said California Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, D-Salinas, who helped secure $210 million in state funding for the project, and sponsored legislation to streamline the permitting process. “It’s been a lot of work, but I won’t rest until the project is 100% done and completed.”
It became clear soon after the levee was built in 1948 that the structure was inadequate. It first failed in 1955. By 1966, Congress approved rebuilding the system, ordering that the work be done “expeditiously.” But under federal rules, funding repeatedly took a backseat to projects in more affluent areas, even after a 1995 flood killed two people in Pajaro.
Finally, after the flood in 2023 that left some 3,000 Pajaro residents homeless and shined a spotlight on the inequities, the reconstruction project gained new life.
Congress had already approved $149 million in initial funding under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Following the 2023 flood, the state legislature agreed to fund not only the state portion of the project, but the local share as well, under legislation championed by Rivas and State Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz.
“There’s a narrative that this valley has been shorted because it’s a disadvantaged community,” Laird said at Wednesday’s groundbreaking. “This project is a tribute to the opposite because there is no other project where the state has bought out the local share.”
Even so, the reconstruction—and the improved flood protection—are still far from reality.
“It’s still ultimately a 5 to 10 year duration to get this project all built out,” said Mark Strudley, executive director of the flood management agency. “Moving utilities out of the way, buying properties and relocating residents and businesses, those are all very complex processes that have a lot of uncertainty and take a lot of time.”
Indeed, Wednesday’s groundbreaking took place not in Pajaro—or even along the Pajaro River—but about two miles to the north in Watsonville along Corralitos Creek, which feeds the Pajaro River. Strudley said that starting construction there allows work on the overall project to get underway sooner, while meeting an important need.
“This segment doesn’t have any levees right now. It is unprotected. It flooded four times, overtopped its banks four times, in 2023. So it's one of the more critical areas to tackle first,” he said.
Officials with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing the construction, did say that by this time next year, all ten miles of the project will either be under construction or in the design phase. But until then–including this winter–the area will remain vulnerable.
“It means we're going to be sweating with the community over the rains,” Strudley said. “Until those levees are fully rebuilt by the Army Corps, that's the point at which people are going to be able to rest easy.”
Additional reporting by KAZU’s Jasmine Mirbaha.
